A Wrinkle in Time poster: Ava DuVernay shatters your reality

The new warriors of Selma director Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time are ready to bring you a different kind of fantasy epic.

Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) stand at the ready on the Disney film’s latest poster, poised to send the young Meg Murry (Storm Reid) on an inter-galactic journey across time and space to both find her father and shatter any illusions of what a leading lady can be.

Each character on the one-sheet gets their own prism as they hurdle towards Chris Pine’s Dr. Alex Murry. In the story, based on the acclaimed book by Madeleine L’Engle, a young girl embarks on a fantastical journey through space to find her missing scientist father as she’s guided by three entities.

“The first image [I had in my head] was to place a brown girl in that role of Meg, a girl traveling to different planets and encountering beings and situations that I’d never seen a girl of color in,” DuVernay told EW. “All of those scenes struck my fancy, and then it was also something that [Disney VP of production] Tendo Nagenda said to me, which I’ll never forget. One of the things that really made me want to read it was when he said, ‘Ava, imagine what you would do with the worlds.’ Worlds! ‘Planets no one’s ever seen or heard of,’ he said. There aren’t any other black women who have been invited to imagine what other planets in the universe might look and feel like. I was interested in that and in a heroine that looked like the girls I grew up with.”

Disney

The new poster, shown above, also comes with a sneak peek at the upcoming trailer, which will debut during the American Music Awards this Sunday.

“Be a warrior,” Mrs. Which says as snapshots of Meg’s mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), The Happy Medium (Zach Galifianakis), Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Who flash across the screen.

“It means everything to be a girl of color and play Meg Murry because Meg Murry is, in the books, a Caucasian little girl,” Reid said. “It’s just surreal because I get to empower other little African-American girls around the world and say that you can be a superhero and you rock and you can conquer the world and you are beautiful just the way you are and your flaws are nothing and you’re awesome. It feels really good to be able to inspire not only little girls [but] everyone.”